New Book :: The Bar at Twilight

The Bar at Twilight
Stories by Frederic Tuten
Bellevue Literary Press, May 2022

In the fifteen stories contained in this collection, The Bar at Twilight, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires — Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau — a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. New York-based Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels, the memoir My Young Life, and two short story collections. Among other honors, Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing.